The Cell Phone celebrates it’s 40th birthday

The first cheap cell phones from a mobile phone was made on April 3, 1973 by Martin Cooper, an inventor working for Motorola. Calling from New York, the first person Cooper dialed was Joel Engel, one of the many engineers who Cooper was competing against in the hopes of being the first to create the mobile phone.

“Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cellphone,” Cooper said in his call, according to The Verge. His call was met with Engel’s stunned silence on the other end.

As a burgeoning technology, the mobile phone was first developed as an extension of business car phones, according to The Guardian. But it wasn’t until ten years after Cooper had filed a patent for it that the mobile phone went up for sale on the consumer market in 1983.

The first consumer mobile phone was called the DynaTAC, known as the “brick phone.” It was 40 ounces, ten inches long, had a battery life of 35 minutes cell phones for sale and retailed for $3,995.

In comparison, today’s 64 GB iPhone 5 weighs 3.95 ounces, is 4.87 inches long and .3 inches thick. The iPhone has a standby life 225 hours and costs $849.00 without a 21sQW1F2 mobile plan.

Over time, cellphones started getting smaller and their battery lives grew. Popular phones such as Nokia phones and Motorola’s StarTAC line grew in popularity in the ‘90s. By the late ‘90s, StarTac was the smallest flip phone on the market weighing only 3 oz. It had a 50 hour standby battery life.

The early 2000s brought the introduction of the Blackberry and a new era of “smart” cellphones. Now, more people were using their phones to text, and in 2000 people were sending an average of 35 text messages a month per person as opposed to the 0.4 texts in 1995, according to Mashable.

However, 40 years after that first call in 1973, Cooper still believes that cellphones have more room to develop.

“Technology has to be invisible,” Cooper told CBS News. “Transparent. Just simple. A modern cell phone in general has an instruction book that's bigger and heavier than the cell phone. That's not right.”

In 2013, over six billion people use cellphones, cheap cell phones and every day the number of smartphone users is rising. Forty years later, cellphones have become an integral part of day-to-day life. Imagining a world without them is a lot like imagining carrying a two-pound phone in your pocket, too weird to be true.